This application claims priority to Korean Patent Application No. 2003-0087297 filed on Dec. 3, 2003 in the Korean Intellectual Property Office, the disclosure of which is incorporated herein in its entirety by reference.
1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to tape circuit substrates, and more particularly, to a tape circuit substrate having a base film reduced in size by minimizing wirings arranged outside a chip mount portion, with example application for a display panel assembly.
2. Background of the Invention
Electronic products such as mobile phones, personal digital assistants (PDAs), liquid crystal panels, and notebook computers, continue to be made smaller, shorter, thinner, and lighter. Thus, parts of such electronic products including mounting of semiconductor chips within such electronic products are desired to be smaller, lighter, highly efficient, and of higher density.
Liquid crystal display devices are being developed to be implemented as one-chip ICs without forming a gate PCB (printed circuit board). However, gate driver chip packages typically do not accommodate such a semiconductor chip structure.
As a result, several new gate driver tape carrier package (TCP) structures have been proposed in which a gate driver PCB is not provided in a liquid crystal display device, including Korean Patent Publication No. 2000-66493 entitled “A Tape Carrier Package, Liquid Crystal Display Panel Assembly having the same, Liquid Crystal Display Device Using the Same and Assembling method thereof”, Korean Patent Publication No. 2001-91646 entitled “Drive and Application timing Determination Module, Liquid Crystal Display Panel Assembly Using the Same, and Method for Testing Driving Signals of the Liquid Crystal Display Panel Assembly”, and Korean Patent Publication No. 2001-9044 entitled “Signal Connecting Member for Liquid Crystal Display Device and Drive IC Mounted thereon”.
Referring to FIG. 1, such references disclose a gate driver TCP 120 including gate driving signal output wiring 123, input pads 142a, and output pads 143. Furthermore, the gate driver TCP 120 is configured with input wirings 122, bypass wirings 125, and output wirings 124 surrounding edges of a semiconductor chip 140. Such wirings 122, 125, and 124 extend along left, upper, and right sides of a base film 121, undesirably resulting in an increase in the area of the base film 121 outside the semiconductor chip 140.
Thus referring to FIG. 1, a length L1 of the base film 121 is increased with such wirings 122, 125, and 124, making the area of the base film 121 and thus the overall size of gate driver TCP 120 larger. With such larger area, miniaturization of a liquid crystal display device is more difficult. In addition, the amount of expensive material for the base film 121 is increased, which is not cost-effective.